Francis Gilbert, father and teacher, shares his quest to find a good secondary school for his son in today's Education Guardian.
It's a tricky business. And as Gilbert knows, once you've chosen the right school, there's still the complex business of school admissions to get through.
"The most important thing is to read the admissions criteria very carefully," he reminds parents.
How true. Unfortunately, there's a dark side to all this that's steadily coming to light: a growing number of parents are reading the admissions rules and deliberately flouting them.
Parents will now stop at almost nothing to secure their child a place at a good school, it seems.
An investigation by the Local Government Association earlier this year found that in 24 out of the 31 councils it quizzed, more parents were lying about where they lived on school application forms.
In some cases in Scotland, parents allegedly forged council tax documents to try to prove they lived in the catchment area.
But are parents entirely to blame? The former schools minister, Andrew Adonis, may well have egged them on when he said he wanted "every parent to be a pushy parent" this summer.
Tell us how far you'd go - or have gone - to get your child into a good school.
